Horsemen Hell - A Comprehensive Card Analysis

[Boop]

Introduction

Now that the cycle of Horsemen is nearly over, it’s an appropriate time to open the flood gates on certain information regarding Horsemen Hell difficulty. I arrived to a pretty sharp conclusion in the first 24 hours of the first Horseman as to what would, or would not be a good team, however I dislike simply shouting out all the information straight away. As a result, I wait for a while before I do any form of write up to give everyone the chance to try solve the problem on their own first. I've have had the pleasure of farming my Faith up to skill level 5/5 to help support my mono white deck, which is pretty much all I play. All the cards listed below are critical to the Horsemen farming strategy. I will tell you what cards are useful, and why we use these cards in general, but I will not tell you the exact teams for which horsemen. That is up to you to figure out. Do understand that different stages will require different team compositions, some offensive and some defensive. For instance, Faith and Famine have considerably higher armour than others, and line ups have to specifically change for them.

Preparation

Step 1: Get yourself about 500 revive potions. I started with 480+ and ended my final run with around 180.
Step 2: Get yourself a pile of energy potions, 150+. Could not count how many I did or did not use, because I use so many on weekends also.
Step 3: Ensure you have nothing to do with your life for 2 weeks. I even had my own guild telling me to ‘get on with the job’ (hello Darren) after a couple of bad days.

Findings

I had 6 Faith’s go to waste. So in total I had to farm 32. We’re going to round this to a total use of 300 revives. I used on average 4 revives because you could not use a defensive based team vs Faith. (Blue/Green/Red Horsemen should only use 2/3 revives) So it’s nice to round, and say it takes a bit over 10 revives per Faith, leading us to one Faith every 3 or 4 runs. Of course this is not how it really works. You have dry patches of 10 runs with no Faith, and then some runs of 2 to 3 Faiths back to back. I was even lucky enough to get 2 Faiths from a single instance twice.

Team Preparation and Critical Cards

To do all 5 Horsemen on Hell, I used the following list of cards. Not listed in any particular order.

Healer:

Holy Priestess – White healer is critical. Whilst Blue Healer puts out the same Heal per Spin, the Blue Healer does not have an emergency activate. This is pretty much a requirement for Horsemen Hell.

Defensive Cards:

Achilles – Achilles probably has the best defensive activate in the game right now. He gives you 5 turns of grace which allows you to heal to full hp and survive 2 full cycles of Stage 5. If you don’t have an Achilles handy, then consider Eden’s Tree of Life as a less effective substitute. (Remember, it isn’t about the amount of damage mitigated, it’s about how many turns/cycles of attacks we can mitigate).
Echidna – This HP card is the shining light of most defensive strategies. Giving a good boost of HP plus Threaten is unbelievably strong.
Snake Spirit Immortal – Situational use. It gives HP and Poison. I’d still take Echidna any day of the week, but it still had it’s on a couple of the stages.

Offensive Cards:

Colour Counter Panzer (and/or Same Colour Panzer) – There are 2 colours in each Stage 5 to deal with it, so take your appropriate colours depending on which one you want to kill first.
Queen of the Undead – We already knew that Poison is op, but QotU really makes short work of some of the bosses, and is even a requirement to make Faith doable in under an hour.
Zeus – Another situational card, really for just chomping armour. I personally don’t find all of the Horsemen threatening, or long winded enough to warrant making Zeus a ‘must always’.

Leader Cards:

Your leader should always be a 50% reduction. Cyclops has no place here. I advise the following. And no, I won’t give you a description why, it’s pretty obvious.
Queen of the Undead
Achilles
Blackbeard
Catalina <3 (Such cute artwork)
Dragon Paladin

Conclusions

Running Hell a few times to get just 1 Horseman to evolve your 8* should be pretty accessible to most players who have either made their investments in the game, or have just been around long enough to utilise Guild Shops well. However farming Horsemen repeatedly is for a special kind of individual (had to be politically correct to not offend). Collecting that many revives/potions was a long term game plan which I realised even just after the first Horsemen. I knew revives would be a huge requirement, so I went for it. It requires a player to farm actively for a long time on weekends to accumulate the gold, then wait for potions, then go crazy. After that, it requires the time to farm the Horsemen, which is ~30 minutes per run if you’re lucky. And how many runs were required?

Is it worth it? Well, no-one can answer that. It’s a personal decision and can only be answered by the individual.

Additional note regarding Famine:

To everyone discussing how incredibly hard it is, and damage, and urghghhg my hp isn’t high enough, you are not utilising critical thinking capabilities to solve problems. It’s not a difficult stage. Start thinking about how to solve problems instead of thinking HP is the answer. HP is not the answer in this game anymore, and has not been for about 2 months.

Everyone – Start getting creative!

[Lee]

Awesome read as always my friend.

Some great detail in here.

Totally agree with the Famine statement also. I'm Lv119, and and spend little so don't have a wide variety deck, but I got my Famine on the 3rd try. Once you work it out, its not all that difficult.

[Benjamin]

Since I don't have Naga/Echidna or Achilles I'm sure running hell is considerably more difficult.

Unfortunately I'm probably best off working at getting these cards instead of burning through revives trying to farm hell.

Are the stage mechanics similar to nightmare (other than damage output)?

Thanks for the great review,

[_0nyx_]

We're talking about the same game and not diablo right It's Insane difficulty not nightmare...

[Benjamin]

Thanks for the correction,

I'm building a mono black deck, unfortunately it'll probably only be good for making quick work on the weekends,

[Boop]

Lee, thanks. I know you're at that difficult mid stage of the game. I hope you learnt something here. Keep pushing!

Benjamin, your priorities at this point in time should be to focus on your solomons team. Idealy you want to farm 5mil+ per weekend. When you hit this stage you'll be able to afford all the potions and 6* cards your guild shop can throw at you. In saying that, if you're working on a black mono, I think just 1 Famine is fine, you won't need an 8* yet. Grind Insane difficulty for it.